Gemini can now scan your photos, email, and more to provide better answers

Google has toyed with personalized answers in Gemini, but that was just a hint of what was to come. Today, the company is announcing extensive “personal intelligence” in Gemini that allows the chatbot to connect to Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube to craft more useful answers to your questions. If you don’t want Gemini to get to know you, there’s some good news. Personal intelligence is beginning as a feature for paid users, and it’s entirely optional.

By every measure, Google’s models are at or near the top of the AI heap. In general, the more information you feed into a generative AI, the better the outputs are. And when that data is personal to you, the resulting inference is theoretically more useful. Google just so happens to have a lot of personal data on all its users, so it’s relatively simple to feed that ...